Twauctex

This mode integrates some tweaks into AUCtex that makes it easier to write LaTeX. More precisely, it does the following:

• Enable one-sentence-per-line mode.
• Supresses unescaped underscores and ampersands.
• Adds a command to compress and align tables (Bound to C-x f by default).
• Adds intersentence space when a sentence ends with capital letters, adds interword space after abbreviations like et al. or PhD.

Features

One-sentence-per line mode

The biggest feature of twauctex is the one-sentence-per-line mode. One-sentence-per-line (OSPL) makes it much easier to read the diffs generated from edits. This is especially useful when collaborating on a LaTeX document (and everyone uses OSPL).

This works by changing the fill function to work on sentences, and making the "space" key electric electric to insert a line break when required. I've taken care to not make this too intrusive – twauctex-electric-environments and twauctex-inhibited-electric-macros allow you to disable the electric functionality in certain macros, and enable them only in certain environments.

Double-pressing the space will remove the inserted newline again, thus inserting only a normal space.

Additionally, twauctex has a feature to not break when entering common abbreviations (such as M.Sc.).

Escaping ampersands and underscores

Ampersands and underscores are somewhat annoying in LaTeX, because they can only be entered without escape characters in certain macros. I've added functionality to autoescape these characters when not in a macro where they have special meaning (such as matrix or align).

Compressing and aligning tables

It's annoying to manually align tables, and remembering the correct syntax for align is a chore. Thus, I've added two commands that make aligning tables a bit easier. Bound to C-c f by default, it will align all the &s. If passed an argument via C-u C-c f, the table will first be compressed by removing all spaces before column separators, and then realign the table.

Intersentence and interword spacing where required.

As chktex is fond of reminding you, if you end a sentence with capital letters, TeX might think you're using an abbreviation, and might not space the sentence correctly. twauctex tries to rectify this by checking for this case (with all the bells and whistles mentioned above) and automatically inserting the \@ when required. Additionally, twauctex will insert inter-word space \ when it's detected an abbreviation.

Installation

(add-to-list 'load-path "D:\\repos\\twauctex\\")
(require 'twauctex)
(twauctex-global-mode)

There's some dependencies: Auctex (obviously) and visual-fill-column-mode. Strictly speaking, visual-fill-column-mode is not required to use one-sentence-per-line mode, but reading sentences that go all the way across your screen could be difficult. For now, it's a hard requirement.

Usage

Simply write your latex as you would normally. twauctex will take care of breaking the line whenever you enter a space after a sentence end. If the standard settings do not agree with you, use (customize-group 'twauctex), and you can customize the builtin configuration.